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Pastor Kaye's Blog

Beloved and Blessed

Okay… I admit to having a few pet peeves. One of them is when I hear something like this: “I am so blessed that I didn’t end up in that horrible accident on the highway this morning!” Could you just tell me what that says about the person who was caught in the accident? God doesn’t love them? God is cursing them for something they’ve done? I know we often don’t think about it that way, but we should.

You see, that type of thinking is clearly Old Testament thinking. If God loves you, God will favor you. If God is angry at you or you aren’t one of the Chosen People, then God will wreak havoc on your life. To me that completely contradicts the God who calls us Beloved and has Chosen each of us, affirming our specialness and excluding no one.

So, the bottom line is that we are each the Beloved of God, we are each Chosen, and we are all at our very core blessed. We are not the inherently sinful beings that much of conservative Christianity would have us believe. We are beautiful and unique pieces of divinity. Accepting all this and living out of it… well, that’s another thing entirely.

Let’s talk about being blessed for a moment. Certainly when we walk through life present and aware, we find God’s blessings everywhere. A robin, a smile, a song, a moment of quiet, an expression of kindness, almost anything when looked at with the right perspective can remind us of God’s presence in our lives.

Then there is something a little deeper and more intimate, a time of being blessed and a time of blessing others. John O’Donohue in his book, To Bless the Space Between Us, says “A blessing is a circle of light drawn around a person to protect, heal, and strengthen…. To invoke a blessing is to call… wholeness upon a person now.” When we truly bless another we bring them back to their True Self, their core, their inherent goodness, their Belovedness. This can be really hard if we don’t truly feel beloved and blessed ourselves. Sometimes we can only give that which we’ve already received. When we can do it, we find that not only have we lifted up another, but we ourselves are lifted up.

I encourage you to move through life offering blessings, but I also encourage you to ask for one when you need it. This is even harder because we’ve been programmed to be strong, to take care of ourselves, to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. But it shows great perception and willingness to trust if, when you find yourself feeling down, worthless, despairing, hollow and hopeless, to ask someone close to you to bless you. It is essentially asking, “Would you please help me find myself again? Because I feel like I’ve lost me. Please give me a blessing so that I might remember who I am.”